Leavenworth Farmer’s Market connects the dots

It’s probably a whole lot easier than an unsolicited phone call during dinner.

With only a short strip of wax paper, upon which are five brightly colored circular stickers, and instructions to put those stickers next to a response to each of five questions, visitors were asked to help guide future efforts of the Leavenworth Farmers Market.

The questions at the “Do the Dots” booth at the market Wednesday all related to the Leavenworth Farmers Market and were part of a “rapid market assessment” coordinated by organizers of the Leavenworth market and the McLouth-based Kansas Rural Center.

Mercedes Taylor-Puckett is the farmers market project coordinator for the KRC. She said there are two other parts of the rapid market assessment — a count of the number of visitors on a given day and constructive comments and observations from KRC and other market officials.

Two questions are always asked in the “Do the Dot” portion of the assessment — how many people are in the shopping party that day and how much that person is looking to spend.

The other three questions vary, she said, and in the past have been used by other farmers markets to test ideas like whether to move to a new venue or change operating hours.

“The three questions that are flexible allow them to get feedback from customers,” Taylor-Puckett said.

Having served as the manager of the Lawrence, Kan., farmers market for about three years, she said she was trained in the rapid market assessment after beginning at the KRC. She said conducting market analysis is not always easy in the fast-moving consumer environment of the farmers market.

“The dots are great because they’re non-invasive,” Taylor-Puckett said. “You’re not coming at somebody with a clipboard, you just stick dots, so you get a higher participation rate.”

Carol Zimmerman, a vendor and member of the board for the Leavenworth Farmers Market, said after the close of the market at 6 p.m. Wednesday, she and another volunteer who helped coordinate the assessment, Joy Kromer, would aggregate the results and turn the data in to KRC for processing and the development of a detailed report.

Zimmerman said in the last year, the market has instituted some of the suggestions that came out of the previous year’s assessment. Data regarding average visitors was used to give vendors an idea of how much product to bring each week.

“We also got feedback from our customers that they would like to see cheese in our market,” she said, which began a recruiting effort for local cheesemakers.

Zimmerman said some of the other data from last year included suggestions on getting the word out on the market. What the organizers found out was that a growing percentage of people found out or wanted to find out about what was happening at the market through online means.

There’s now a dedicated Facebook page for the twice-weekly market, an e-mail newsletter that has more than 1,000 subscribers and a push for additional signage on the street, another suggestion of the assessment.

This year, Zimmerman said the market is hoping to gather some information on how to best attract more younger visitors. But she said the vendors and organizers of the Leavenworth Farmers Market will take all of the input into consideration when making decisions on future changes.

“The more information we gather, the better our market will be,” she said. “Because we’ll know what our customers want.”